2016 Doctoral Fellows

Alyssa Cole - History

Cole's research explores the roles and contributions of African American women in the Armed Forces of the United States from 1945-1973. In addition to documenting their experiences and career trajectories, she explores the ways in which these women used military service as a potential pathway to citizenship. Following the integration of the Armed Forces in 1948, African Americans have served in increasing numbers in all military services. She hopse for my research to fill a much-needed gap in current scholarship on African American women’s commitments and sacrifices to the United States Military.

Alysha Griffin - Theatre

Alysha trains at the Actor’s Training Studio in Overland Park, Kansas and works with KU’s Project on the History of Black Writing (ProjectHBW) — an archive dedicated to the recovery and study of black novels. Her areas of interest include African American theatre and performance, acting, stage adaptations, and performance theory.

SeungJoo Lee - Spanish and Portuguese

Lee’s research focuses on social contexts of detective plots in diverse literary genres in Latin America and the effectiveness and limits of this production. By reviewing the major literary narratives of the past two centuries, she aims to reevaluate political aspects of socially marginalized first-person narrators in contemporary Latin American Literature. As a translator she is deeply interested in transatlantic and transpacific discourses related to modernity, post-colonialism, diaspora, national and ethnic identity, and border issues.

Austin McGuire - Clinical Child Psychology

McGuire is interested in understanding the effects of trauma exposure in children and adolescents. This includes trying to understand how biological, social, and psychological factors separately and in conjunction influence youth's developmental pathology, with emphasis on the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Additionally, he is interested in improving how trauma exposure is measured.

Alisa Russell - English

Russell’s research explores how genres of writing intersect with individual standpoints, and she focuses on how genre might be used as a tool for social action. She is especially interested in how these ideas shape writing pedagogy and writing program design, as well as how they inform daily interactions with public genres.

Yuyu Zeng - Linguistics

Zeng’s major research interest is speech perception. The lack of invariance has been a problem for speech perception and word recognition studies, as there is no reliable relation between a sound of a language and its physical manifestation. Despite the huge variation, speakers perceive and recognize sound effortlessly in most cases. Using lexical tone as her current test tool, she hopes to better model the process of speakers utilizing variations to achieve successful interpretation of spoken language.